Manhattan Beach resident Dr. Aaron Bright is an ER physician who makes medical house calls to busy people hoping to avoid long waits at hospitals. "We want to be an old-fashioned country doctor with a modern arsenal," Bright said of the service he and his colleagues offer.

When a tap dancer hurt her ankle on the set of “Secret Talents of the Stars,” Dr. Brian Wilbur was soon at the CBS soundstage in Studio City – making sure the show would go on.

Wilbur helped the dancer and then did some basic cast health checks, like taking the blood pressure of Debbie Reynolds, one of the judges.

The doctor left the set but he was called back twice again that day – once to diagnose acute appendicitis in another dancer and then to check on Olympic figure skater and contortionist Sasha Cohen, who had blacked out after twisting herself into a pretzel.

Wilbur and his colleagues, Manhattan Beach resident Dr. Aaron Bright and Dr. Andrew Kassinove, have turned an old-school practice into a new business model: instead of having patients come to an office for treatment, the doctors go to them.

But they do much more than house calls.

Thanks to word-of-mouth referrals, STAT Housecalls has now worked on five reality TV sets, even as it builds a healthy house-call business to private homes.

“We wanted to try to slow it down and see if we could take care of people more traditionally,” said Bright, who met his partners when they were all residents in the emergency room at County-USC Medical Center. “We want to be an old-fashioned country doctor with a modern arsenal.”

The doctors hadn’t planned on courting Hollywood as a client base, but production companies and studios have emerged as a key niche for STAT – which means urgent in Latin. A key attraction is that doctors making calls directly to the set means producers don’t have to halt filming for too long.

Los Angeles is a great location for the new venture. But the doctors say the city does have drawbacks.

“L.A. is so big and spread out,” Bright said. “Certain times of the day it’s going to take two hours to get out to a patient.”

After Wilbur’s day at CBS, word started to spread about the doctors, and the budding firm is now fielding calls from most of the big studios.

STAT hasn’t secured any retainer arrangements yet with studios, but it sees Hollywood as a growing business. And since launching in March, the company has signed up about a dozen families. As demand grows, it has doctors it knows from USC waiting to come on board.

Part of the demand for its services has come with the growth of reality TV in general.

On shows such as “Survivor,” contestants have to go through extensive physical exams with EKG brain scans and blood work. Even for stars like Reynolds, doing just one or two days of judging on a show, producers are legally bound to do some basic health checks.

“There’s a small little monopoly of doctors who take care of the entertainment industry,” Bright said. “(But) you have to go to their office; they are not up to date. I guess it’s the kind of thing where they’ve used the same guy for 20 years.”

The idea for STAT came out of frustration at seeing the bureaucracy of the emergency room, the waiting and dissatisfaction among patients.

The three roving doctors have stocked their cars with supplies to treat everything from broken bones to bronchitis. They claim they can do just about anything an emergency room or urgent-care office can do, but more efficiently.

They don’t deal with symptoms of life-threatening illness, like chest pains, which they said should be left to a 911 call. But the service makes them a perfect fit for people who can’t afford to spend time waiting in an emergency room for hours. That might be a busy executive, for instance, or talent on a television set, where an entire crew is on the clock whether their star is there or not.

Still, STAT expects half its clients will be regular people who either don’t have insurance through their job or are fed up with their HMO.

The cost for unlimited house calls and 24-hour communication via e-mail, text message or video chat is $2,700 a year, and $1,300 for each additional family member. Patients, such as business travelers, can also pay $500 for a one-time house call, to a hotel, for example, which would include antibiotics.

That flat fee could be applied to the annual retainer charge.

That may sound like a lot, but with health-care premiums continuing to jump, it might make sense for someone who is relatively healthy and has a high-deductible plan.

Bright concedes that most paying clients will be in the higher-income brackets, but he said the team is also committed to serving lower-income clients as well.

The group is donating its services to The Boys & Girls Club of Venice, and plans to take on low-income clients on a volunteer basis when they can.

“We wanted to charge people who could afford it and volunteer for people who can’t afford it,” Bright said. “We’re taking a pretty good pay cut, this is something we are doing for our own sanity.”